THE WORLD FROM.Cambridge, Mass. American and Soviet Experts Hope to Set Soviets on the Pathway to Democracy and a Free Market

Francis, David R., The Christian Science Monitor

HARVARD University professor Graham Allison gave several Soviet
economists a sweat shirt with the words written on it (in Russian):
"Just Do It."

He, a few other academics from Harvard and Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and the six Soviet economists are trying to
persuade Soviet leaders to act on reform, not just talk about it.

Mr. Allison, a former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of
Government, says there is too much planning in the Soviet Union, too
much preparation, too much utopianism.

The small group of Soviet and American economists or political
scientists have high ambitions.

Over the past three weeks they have devised a plan, a "grand
bargain" that would dramatically change the world if - a big "if
accepted by the leaders of the Soviet Union and the Western
industrial democracies. It would transform the Soviet Union into a
democracy and a full-fledged market economy. It would commit the
United States and the other six members of the Group of Seven
industrialized nations to assist this transformation with both
technical help and unspecified billions of dollars of financing.

The Soviet Union would become a "normal country, a civilized
country," as some Soviet citizens put it, not a country driven by
Marxist-Leninist ideology and pledged to world revolution.

Economists, of course, have had a major impact on world history.
John Maynard Keynes, the famed British economist, wrote about the
influence of "dead economists." Keynes, representing the British
government, along with Harry Dexter White, a Harvard man and
undersecretary of the US Treasury, and economist Edward Bernstein,
were leading designers of the system of financial institutions - the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and, in a way, the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade - which stemm
ed from the 1944 Bretton Woods conference and still help maintain
the world economic order. …

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